Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Please remind those of us reading this thread who are less familiar with the reliable books on the subject what books are good books about C. I know about K & R, but what else do busy C programmers recommend?

After edit: when you know a book is crap, do you say so in reviews on Amazon.com? That's helpful for people browsing books by subject.

View on HN

A dog eared copy of http://www.careferencemanual.com/ is what I keep on my desk at work, it is not a learn C book, it somewhat unsurprisingly is a reference manual.

Authors(Samuel P.Harbison and Guy L.Steele Jr.) write concisely and clearly.

For tricky C language questions CAR is much preferable over trying to find answers in the standard.

I had misremembered titles last night, and thought that the book used as a reference here was the one panned in the article submitted to open this thread. Whew! The book we have is actually Harbison and Steele. I tried to read the Amazon recommendations carefully before buying.

I've heard that C Interfaces and Implementation is a good read after you've got an understanding of the language. I don't know any good encyclopedic references, though. I'm still learning the language myself.

I don't see what's wrong with saying that an educational book that has misinformation in it should be avoided on Amazon. With other things it might be more open to opinion, but if whole swathes of a reference book are filled with errors, I don't see what's wrong with writing a negative review.

This thread has some good recommendations:

32 years on, K&R's "The C Programming Language" still stands alone

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1245255

I found Peter van der Linden's Expert C Programming to be excellent, and, as a bonus, fun to read (which you can't really say of K&R).

Word (although I find K&R a pleasant read). My copy is at the office; I often take a quick glance through it when I need to poke at some C code and usually end up spotting latent bugs.

I don't know if it's considered good, but here's an online option:

http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/

For newbies, Kelly and Pohl's "A Book On C" has been excellent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com